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Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

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Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#81

Post by Tostino »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #66
omegaworks wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They saw the land was lightly populated and took it. This framing is passive and hides the history that our own government even admits to[1]. The west wasn't simply lightly populated. There were state-sponsored and well documented extermination campaigns that cleared the land for white settlement. 1. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/what-happened-to-the-bison....

The West, other then the coastline itself, is lightly populated now. It was absolutely lightly populated back then.

Then why did we feel the need to clear the land of them? cough genocide cough

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#82

Post by TaylorAlexander »

secondcoming wrote: post #78
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly political threads. American westward expansion had to be justified, for example, by claiming cultural superiority over the people who were being displaced.

What has this got to do with archaeology?

Primarily this is just a direct reply to the person above me. That said, the way we view historical cultures is impacted by politics, and to properly understand the archeological record we need to be able to separate politics from facts. We cannot do this if we don’t recognize the distinction.

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#83

Post by margalabargala »

chemeng wrote: post #46
skylurk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind sharing a link to that evidence?

I was also skeptical, seems there’s a lot more to this story. Not that they didn’t disappear and reappear, but the spread of them isn’t as straightforward as we thought. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/native-americans-s...

That's basically the same claim. This is saying "the europeans brought them, and they spread around faster than we thought". Which is interesting and fine, but that's a far cry from the above claim of "actually, that ten thousand year period where they appeared to be extinct never happened and they were around the whole time".

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#84

Post by woliveirajr »

swatcoder wrote: post #19
woliveirajr wrote: post #3

Engravings that are 2,000 years old: so the river was (at least) this low without the current climate change, no?

I'm going to generously assume that you're asking a sincere question and not trying some tired political baiting, even though you mentioned climate change out of nowhere. Yes, rivers are extremely dynamic -- they run dry, flood, and change course over time. Often, those changes are dramatic and oscillatory so the same path may repeatedly run dry or wet over periods of years, decades, centuries, millennia, and longer.…

Yes, it was a real question.

"Climate change" didn't come in vain: there are many news using small events as a final proof of a new ice / greenhouse / warm / climate change era. So, can the fact of something happening in the past be a proof of something ? And yes, your reply was a good one. Assume "good faith" should be the norm to a open and sincere debate... Thanks!

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#85

Post by omegaworks »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #66
omegaworks wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They saw the land was lightly populated and took it. This framing is passive and hides the history that our own government even admits to[1]. The west wasn't simply lightly populated. There were state-sponsored and well documented extermination campaigns that cleared the land for white settlement. 1. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/what-happened-to-the-bison....

The West, other then the coastline itself, is lightly populated now. It was absolutely lightly populated back then.

> It was absolutely lightly populated back then.

What makes you say that? Some studying the California natives put their population at 300,000, some all the way up to 1.5MM and that's after they were hit by waves of infectious disease.

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#86

Post by hnbad »

verisimi wrote: post #70
hnbad wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change does not simply cause more severe weather events but also more frequent severe weather events. This means a "once in a century" event can turn into a yearly occurrence. It's also a cumulative process with cascading effects and emergent properties, so you can't just reduce the factors that contribute to the climate crisis and get back to where we were before the same way you a molten candle won't turn b…

Thank you for taking the time to respond. However, your answer has 'climate change' baked in. What evidence is there in this article to suggest climate change, rather than an intermittent event that has probably occurred numerous times in the past 2000 years? Why does the article say 'climate change'? Why do you think it? Why was the river low 2000 years ago, in pre-climate change times? The thing is that there have…

> What evidence is there in this article to suggest climate change

The article is not about climate change, it's about a drought. It doesn't try to present evidence for climate change.

> The weather has always changed

The plural of weather is not climate. Weather is an emergent effect of the climate. I don't have a collection of references to dump on you to demonstrate climate change because it's the scientific consensus, even within the United States. At this point, if you're scientifically literate enough to be on HN, you're scientifically literate enough to look up scientific explanations for why your intuitions and concerns about climate change maybe not being a thing after all are wrong. I'm not going to spend my finite lifetime trying to argue this with a person on the Internet, especially someone who might be religiously motivated.

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